How trauma-informed pedagogy fosters trust, joy in life, and inner flexibility.
Many people have experienced traumatic situations. But more than half of those affected are resilient enough to work through most stressful events to a greater or lesser extent so that no stress-related disorders persist. Another quarter of people find relief by talking about their experiences or accepting other forms of support so that after a few days or weeks, things return to normal. This essay focuses on the approximately 10 to 15 percent of people in whom the stress does not subside and who develop trauma-related consequences. The most common form is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is characterized by intrusions, avoidance, agitation, and impairments in cognition and mood. Taken together, these factors severely restrict a person’s life, sometimes leading to a complete loss of motivation and even the will to live. For example, among American soldiers who fought in Vietnam, more died by suicide after the war than were killed by gunfire during combat.1
Psychological intrusions are recurring images, emotions, or physical sensations that constantly replay the trauma. These are not memories. Memories are an active process. For example, we can recall with some effort what we received for our birthday five years ago. We have to want to remember, and we do it actively. Memories also eventually quiet down—unlike trauma. The images from the traumatic situation come uninvited, without our will. Triggered by certain events, they haunt our souls like the Flying Dutchman haunts the world’s oceans. These images come uncalled and do not fade. They have a presence, as if everything were happening all over again.
It’s understandable that we try to avoid this and therefore shy away from triggers that bring these images to mind. At the same time, however, this prevents us from processing those experiences. And we end up thinking about pink elephants precisely when we resolve not to think about them. Avoidance actually makes everything worse.
Agitation escalates into overstimulation because we suspect danger everywhere and are highly sensitive to it, leaving us under constant stress. However, this can also be followed by understimulation, so that everything becomes too much for us and we run out of energy. The traumatized person no longer knows what a balanced state feels like. This impairs our cognitive functions and distorts our thinking. Feelings of shame and guilt, fears, worries, and grief dominate the soul. Children can barely learn anymore. PTSD is like the bursting of a dam. All kinds of illnesses, both psychological and bodily, can arise—sometimes even decades later.
Diseases Have a History
Trauma is more than just stress. When we’re under stress, we still have reflexes: fight or flight. These reflexes often ensure our survival. Trauma is severe or toxic stress in which we no longer have reflexes and freeze. Stress mobilizes enormous forces within the physical body, which we direct outward in fight-or-flight situations. When we freeze, these forces turn inward and can cause destruction there. Trauma leads to freezing and paralysis, as in the biblical image of Lot’s wife, who turned into a pillar of salt. Psychological flexibility, brain functions, and physiological processes (hormones, the immune system, circulation, or digestion) can become impaired or elude the body’s self-regulatory mechanisms, taking on a life of their own as cancer, heart attacks, autoimmune diseases, anxiety, and depression. After all, illnesses do not just fall from the sky. They have a pre-history in which we often find a trauma.
Trauma therefore always affects the whole human being. Gottfried Fischer and Peter Riedesser describe trauma as “an existential experience of discrepancy between threatening situational factors and an individual’s coping capacities, which is accompanied by feelings of helplessness and defenseless vulnerability and thus causes a lasting disruption of one’s understanding of self and the world.”2
Don’t we usually feel that we make a good team with the world? If our sense of self and our understanding of the world are constantly being shaken, that is no longer the case. In the early years, a child experiences the world and itself as a cohesive whole, as if the world were created just for them. This fosters their development: The world is good! In the first years of school, the child learns to understand the world anew and to help shape it on a small scale, and when this succeeds, the child experiences: The world is beautiful! After puberty, we seek to comprehend the world intellectually and to prove ourselves within it. When we find answers, we experience that the world is true. Trauma stands in the way of all this. A trauma is not good, it is not beautiful, and it contradicts everything we have experienced as true. It does not always have to be a terrible or extreme event. Even many small drops can cause the bucket to overflow, leading us to experience the world as not good, not beautiful, and not true, so that our self-image and our picture of the world no longer align.
A lack of love or only conditional love, emotional neglect, emotional or bodily abuse, poverty at home, parents dealing with stress or illness, not being able to make friends, being teased, humiliated, or even bullied in preschool or school: all of these factors can add up and lead to the same traumatic consequences as acute acts of violence, horrific experiences, accidents, or the loss of loved ones. Seen in this light, we have affected children in almost every school classroom and in almost every kindergarten class today. What’s missing are trusted adults with whom the child can feel understood, protected, supported, valued, and welcome. People with intellectual disabilities, who find it harder to understand the world, are the demographic with the highest rates of and deepest trauma—and where we often fail to know there’s trauma. With just four or more stressful childhood experiences, the risk of obesity, diabetes, and cancer doubles. The risk of heart and respiratory diseases, as well as liver and digestive disorders, triples. The risk of depression, anxiety disorders, risky sexual behavior, and problematic alcohol use quadruples; the risk of engaging in violence increases sevenfold; and the risk of problematic drug use increases tenfold. The first Waldorf school, founded in 1919, was a school of children traumatized by World War I. Much of what is embedded in trauma-informed education can be found in the Waldorf school’s first curriculum, though not everything. However, even in trauma-informed education, certain elements that Rudolf Steiner incorporated into his educational philosophy—and which have proven fundamental in trauma work—are still missing.
Give Sorrow Words
At the heart of the therapy lies what Shakespeare long ago articulated: “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.”3 This can—especially at the beginning—intensify the trauma, because everything that had been suppressed by the avoidance strategy resurfaces in consciousness in a disorganized and distressing way. Therefore, a stable, respectful, reliable, and emotionally validating relationship should be established first until the avoidance strategy is no longer necessary for the person affected and they are ready to share their story. This preparatory work—the “stabilization” process—involves techniques for relaxation, emotion regulation, and distancing, as well as the development of a renewed sense of self-worth and epistemic trust, all of which are also provided by trauma-informed education. Often, therapy is then no longer necessary. The most important aspect of working with traumatized people is one’s inward posture and disposition. In our seminars abroad and at our institute in Germany,4 we explain this posture using Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait as Zeuxis. Zeuxis is said to have been a Greek painter in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. He was commissioned to paint the beautiful Helen, who had, however, been dead for several hundred years. So he painted the most beautiful women in Greece and assembled them into a portrait that was praised to the highest degree. After depicting perfect beauty, so the legend goes, he wanted to paint ugliness. With perfect beauty within him, the contrast to the first ugly people was so great that he had to laugh—laugh until he could no longer breathe and died.
Now, toward the end of his life, Rembrandt paints himself as Zeuxis.5 He had endured many setbacks. So, he paints the image hinted at on the left and turns toward his model. As he does so, he looks at us, the viewers. Regardless of whether we are physically beautiful or ugly, doesn’t every person have ugliness within them—unwholesome thoughts, drives, and burdensome emotions? It seems as though Rembrandt sees all of this. But he isn’t mocking us; rather, he looks at us openly with a friendly smile, as if to say, “I know all of that—but I can tell you, life goes on!”
The painting reveals more, though. The golden border of his cloak rises darkly from below, gains warmth around the heart, and, in purely compositional terms, becomes lighter as it curves around his neck. It reaches his forehead, no longer as the collar of a cloak, but as a radiant light. On August 16, 1908, Steiner wrote the following dedication in a book for the Rietmann family: “The riddles of life are solved in the warmth of the heart striving for the light of knowledge.” We see this in this image as well. The warm, golden sympathy of the heart—empathy—rises up and creates luminous thoughts. At the university, we are taught otherwise: we are supposed to explore the darkness of the heart with a cool head. Steiner turns this around. Empathizing with an individual’s suffering means becoming conscious that we are no better than the person standing before us. Helping that person means realizing that the person standing before us is the only expert on themselves, their resources, and their experiences. They have survived situations that we did not have to endure.
Joy and Kindness Are Medicine
In a traumatic situation, everything is too much, too intense, and too fast. The cerebrum, as the instrument of thought, empathy, understanding, and forgiveness, as well as our ideals, fantasy, and spirituality, cannot keep up. It becomes blocked. All negative emotions—and traumatized people have plenty of them—reinforce this blockade. Only warm feelings, especially joy, can break through. That is why all the measures we can take are only effective when we extend to the person before us a warm heart and the kindness that Rembrandt depicts or when we remain joyful ourselves, stream out confidence, and thus make joy possible for others. The traumatic state of paralysis is referred to in the literature as “freezing.” Something grows cold. And where something is too cold, warmth is needed—not so much a hot water bottle as a warm heart. Movement, too, is needed, for it is the opposite of rigidity. This applies to external movement in play, eurythmy, or experiential education, but even more so to inner movement and flexibility.
Steiner concludes the first lecture cycle for prospective Waldorf teachers with an appeal that takes on a special significance: Imbue yourself with the power of imagination; have courage for the truth; sharpen your feeling for soul responsibility.6 This does not mean daydreaming about owning a villa on the California coast.
That is not what it means to have courage for the truth—at least, not for most people. Nor does it refer to fantasizing about how to take revenge on the perpetrators who caused the trauma; that is not what it means to take soul responsibility. Viktor Frankl brought this phrase to life (although he probably did not read it in Steiner’s work). His parents, brother, and wife were murdered in a concentration camp. He was also arrested and lived there under the most appalling conditions, with no realistic chance of survival. But he did have this “fantasy”: he imagined how, if he were to survive, he could help people who had experienced something similar. He was then able to use his years of experience as a psychotherapist to do so. His soul responsibility was embodied in his unyielding will to help. This shows how luminous and effective ideas can arise from the warmth of the heart. He saw that, in such adverse situations, the soul, on its own, produces nothing but fear, helplessness, hatred, and despair. He soon saw clearly that there must be more than just body and soul, as psychology had assumed. In this space of freedom, which no tormentor could ever rob him of, he found what he called the “spirit” and realized that this alone is what heals. Without fully immersing oneself in this “faculty of imagination,” it is not possible to become a trauma educator or trauma therapist.
Walking in Someone Else’s Moccasins
Imagination is also the tool we use to try to put ourselves in the place of another, just as Rembrandt was able to do. This is often referred to as “mentalization.” Native Americans expressed it this way: “If you want to understand someone else, walk a hundred steps in their moccasins.” Mentalization is a delicate process. It involves being able to shift your perspective based on someone’s appearance, mannerisms, facial expressions, tone of voice, social behavior, or interests. Like stepping into another person’s shoes, it’s about understanding how they might be feeling and what would be good for them. This is only possible if we manage our own stress, recognize our emotions, own up to them, activate those that are appropriate in the moment, and lovingly set aside the others. In principle, even infants could do this if they felt love and acknowledgement. It’s a skill we can quickly destroy when we are judgmental, critical, or angry. Trauma also destroys this fragile structure.
Paul Klee must have been aware of this connection; otherwise, he wouldn’t have painted the image A Scrap of Community. The painting is really just a scrap—perhaps a carelessly discarded piece of fabric, fraying at the edges and painted with simple means—but that is why it’s so striking. We see two faces, indicated by a few simple lines. The left face has no outer boundary; it’s open and thus vulnerable, while the right face seems to rest in a state of self-containment. But something from the first face flows into the second, even extends beyond it, as if the figure on the right were taking in something from the first—something that becomes lighter within, while it was dark in the first. It also grows larger and protrudes from the right figure’s side, like an upward-pointing arrow. Overall, the image has a dynamic quality, a direction from left to right. Something passes from the figure on the left to the one on the right, emerging from the dark middle of the left figure to brighten inwardly in the right. The left face has only one eye, while the right has two. Let’s assume that the lack of outline around the left figure and the dark middle represent distress—vulnerability (borderless) and a wound (dark middle). People in distress have tunnel vision; they are focused on one single problem. Distress intensifies because any comforting viewpoints may be blocked by the stress, so it is as if they only see with one eye.
Mentalization is about allowing oneself to listen. It is about letting the act of listening, the interest, the attention, and what is said to take root inwardly. What one sees with two eyes or hears with two ears has the power to call forth the story behind the story within the educator or therapist. Mentalization involves a way of perceiving that takes hold of the courage, the struggle, and the resources within the narrative that may point toward solutions. Such attentive listening requires inner calm, patience, and interest—qualities that the right facial expression also makes visible for our counterpart. Sometimes the other person emerges within us as an image for only a brief instant—perhaps just like a scrap.
It is only through mentalization that what is essential for all learning emerges: epistemic trust. Epistemic trust means trusting that what we are told is true and helpful. Without this trust, we would doubt everything, even the good—or believe everything, even the lies.
Today’s Problem Was Yesterday’s Solution
We can imagine a tree growing within us—from perception, feeling, empathy, and mentalization all the way to epistemic trust. This tree is cut down by trauma. Everything becomes incomprehensible; the rift between self and world seems unbridgeable, leaving only feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and depression. Filled with shame, we withdraw inwardly, though this is often masked by aggressive or clownish behavior. We can help the traumatized person replant and nurture this tree within themselves. The inner posture and disposition we bring to the person in question makes this possible; this is how we demonstrate and enable trust. This also involves transparency, ensuring there are no surprises that a traumatized person might perceive as a threat. It also involves participation, allowing the traumatized person to have a say in what happens to them. Self-efficacy is essential. Only the experience of being able to do something (that is also recognized by others) creates a sense of self-efficacy—especially when this can be repeated again and again. From this beginning, the expectation of further self-efficacy throughout one’s future life can grow. Another key point of trauma-informed education and therapy is the idea that there are valid reasons for one’s current behavior. Some dysfunctional behaviors are actually survival strategies. Those who were unable to defend themselves in times of distress now display the aggression they were unable to express at that critical moment. Those who could not flee now retreat into their inner world. What is a problem for them today was their solution yesterday. Now, though, it is a disturbance. And yet, this behavior allows them to feel they can survive. To discriminate against someone for this behavior would be to discriminate against their very survival. Instead, we should value these good reasons and focus the goal on channelling this force into something meaningful.
It is also essential to understand that the symptoms that arise after a trauma do not reveal anything particular about a person’s personality. The symptoms are, in fact, caused by the trauma. The message—whether spoken or unspoken—is always: “It’s not you who is wrong; it was what you experienced that was wrong.” The symptoms of trauma envelop a healthy personality like a prison, as if they had been enchanted by evil forces, like in a fairy tale. In “Snow White and Rose Red,” for example, the two children were initially afraid when a bear appeared, but eventually, the fur splits open, and the children see the golden royal robe of the enchanted prince.
Hansjörg Palm made this image into a three-meter-tall oak sculpture, now located in the entrance hall of the Laufenmühle facility for people with special needs in Welzheim.7 Every co-worker who walks past is reminded that behind a person’s symptoms lies a king’s daughter or a king’s son. The resident who helped create the sculpture is portrayed and honored in the bear’s face.
Learning to Laugh at Your Own Mistakes
The importance of movement has already been mentioned. Inner movement can arise through theatrical play, through listening to good stories, and through reflecting on the progress that has been made. Movement arises through artistic activity, through the self-empowering experience of seeing how a work of art comes into being when guided in a way that draws on one’s resources. And it arises through play. There are games that strengthen bodily awareness, as this is often disrupted. There are games that foster a sense of community, since loneliness is a common problem. There are games that promote attentiveness, games that enhance concentration—something traumatized people often struggle with—and games that build trust. But what always becomes clear during these games, whether with children or adults, is that people learn to laugh at their own mistakes. And games foster a sense of joy that some people have been unable to experience for years after a traumatic event. (It certainly goes without saying that, at first, these are not games where there are winners and losers.)
In a similar way, the arts also help with self-regulation. One’s soul life may be poisoned by distressing emotions stemming from past trauma. As we bring an image or a sculpture into shape, our aesthetic sensibility focuses on what is emerging. It is the opposite of a traumatic process: instead of being weighed down by the past, we become open to a glimpse of the future.
After one hundred years of Waldorf education, “rhythm” has proven essential for healthy development. Rhythm is equilibrium, a balancing between poles, between the catabolic nerve-sense system and the anabolic metabolic-limb system connected to our will. Even in “healthy” people, thinking and willing do not always follow the same paths. This is even more true for people who have experienced trauma. The brain changes, especially in cases of early childhood trauma, which distorts the processing of sensory impressions. Functional or even manifest metabolic disorders can also develop. Even under stress, our thinking changes, leading to generalizations, black-and-white thinking, emotional thinking, “catastrophizing,” and personalization. This leads to a reversal of cause and effect, in which victims blame themselves. And what of the will? As mentioned in the example of American soldiers, it can be completely extinguished. In such cases, a disturbance—or even a blockage—of rhythmic processes is always evident; this can be measured by the relationship between breathing and pulse (heart rate variability).
Anthroposophic medicine has a lot to offer in this regard, not least through the remedy Cardiodoron. At the same time, a great deal can be achieved here through educational means. For while rhythms are established during pregnancy, they are only subtly present. And just like tender little plants that need to be watered and nurtured, these rhythms require nurturing through a rhythmic environment. What has developed in terms of rhythmic competence can be permanently destroyed by trauma. Or, in the case of children, this development—which continues until the end of the Rubicon—can be interrupted. That is why we need strong rituals. So we always begin with an opening and closing circle. In the morning, a verse is recited, then a song is sung, and finally a rhythmic movement is performed. In the evening, the rhythmic movement is performed first, then the song is sung, and finally the verse is recited. In the morning, the head is activated first, then the heart, and finally the movement—in an incarnating process—and in the evening, the order is reversed. The day should be well-structured, with a rhythmic alternation of calm and enlivened activities. There are necessary breaks, rhythmic games, plenty of group music, body percussion, eurythmy, and, if appropriate, rhythmic massages and conversation.
Once we begin to establish a rhythm, our soul finds itself in order again as well. This is because it has been proven that pleasant emotions are more likely to arise when grounded in a healthy rhythm. Conversely, rhythm is weakened by stressful emotions. It improves with joy, appreciation, and empathy. The soul “rides” on our rhythms. Overall, the flourishing of rhythmic functions has been disrupted by urbanization and the media-saturated world. Steiner must have sensed this when he considered it an educational task to foster what can no longer flourish on its own. This affects us all equally, but especially people who have experienced trauma. At the Free Institute for Trauma Pedagogy and Trauma-Centered Counseling [Freien Institut für Traumapädagogik und traumazentrierte Fachberatung] in Bochum, we are now in our eighth year of training. Similarly, we have provided continuing education to thirty people in Iraq. In collaboration with the Friends of Waldorf Education [Freunden der Erziehungskunst] in Ukraine, we conducted the training program with six groups of about 25 people each, mentored the participants, and qualified thirty as trainers. Many have told us that this not only benefits the people they work with, but that this knowledge and skill has also given their own lives a new perspective.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Title image Paul Klee, Ein Fetzen Gemeinschaft [A scrap of community], 1932, 26.5 × 40 cm, private collection; photograph by Interfoto/Fine Arts/Alamy Stock Photo.
Footnotes
- APA/Red., “Vietnam-Veteranen: Mehr Suizide als Kriegstote,” Die Presse, October 24, 2007 [cf. April Smith, “More Military Veterans and Active Duty Service Members Are Dying by Suicide Than in Battle—Understanding Why Can Help with Prevention,” The Conversation, May 22, 2024.
- Gottfried Fischer and Peter Riedesser, Lehrbuch der Psychotraumatologie [Textbook of psychotraumatology] (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1998).
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth. Act 4, Scene 3.
- Freies Internationales Institut für Notfall- und Traumapädagogik gGmbH.
- The painting is displayed at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne.
- Rudolf Steiner, The Foundations of Human Experience, CW 293 (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1996), lecture in Stuttgart, Sept. 5, 1919.
- EINS und ALLES: Erfahrungsfeld der Sinne [ONE and ALL: Experience center for the senses], 73642 Welzheim, Christopherus.
